“Recently, I’ve read people on the Internet saying that the ranks of academics must be cleansed, purified and rectified,” Mr. Gong said. “I can’t agree with this. This was the mentality of 1957 or 1966.”

This is what we call the conformity type,” psychiatrist and leading Internet-addiction specialist Takashi Sumioka said. “This type of obsession is caused by the fear that they will get left out or bullied in a group if they don’t reply quickly.”

The government’s plan to expand the foreign trainee internship program to cover manpower shortages in nursing-care services for the elderly is problematic in multiple ways. It deviates from the purpose of the program to promote technical transfers to developing economies by training internees from those countries, while failing to properly address problems in the program, which is criticized for being widely used as a cover for exploiting low-cost labor from overseas

On February 14th, Kakumei-teki himote doumei (革命的非モテ同盟) — literally, “Revolutionary Alliance of Men That Woman Are Not Attracted To”– will gather in Shibuya, an area of Tokyo popular with young couples, to protest Valentine’s Day and its roots in what they call “romantic capitalist oppression.”